Council tells City Center developer to rework plans regarding street

The developer of Basehor City Center will need to rethink his plans, after a City Council vote last week.

The council voted to clarify its earlier condition to require an "additional street connection at Crestwood Drive" to mean that Crestwood Drive is to become a through street for the Basehor City Center development.

Planning Director Dustin Smith had brought the issue to the council during discussion of the development plans for Basehor City Center, a retail, residential and municipal development in downtown Basehor. The center includes plans for a grocery store.

"Crestwood Drive lines up with a parking lot entrance of the grocery store," Smith said. "The intent was to continue Crestwood Drive through the subdivision and connect it up with Street B."

Smith said the council had approved an ordinance containing several conditions for the City Center plans, including one that said, "additional street connection at Crestwood Drive." He said he brought it back to the council to clarify the intent of the approved condition because he believed a parking lot entrance was an unacceptable connection to Crestwood Drive.

"This is not what the council agreed to," Council member Keith Sifford said. "This was not the intent of the resolution passed in September. As far as I'm concerned, the intent was perfectly clear. I think that we need to uphold the thing that we agreed to back in September and make that a through street there at Crestwood."

Council member Iris Dysart disagreed. She said she thought the plan was fine because Crestwood Drive was more or less a cul-de-sac at this point. Having City Center developer Mike Duncan make Crestwood a through street would require him to redesign the plans and slow the entire process, Dysart added.

"Crestwood to me is no more than a glorified cul-de-sac," she said. "There's not much traffic. We're going to sabotage this man's entire development plan. : I frankly don't think it's worth it."

Sifford said the city would be setting a bad precedent if it let the developer interpret the council's intent in his own way. Sifford said the council was constantly talking about how important north and south access as well as street continuity is in the Comprehensive Plan, and the council needed to look at the big picture.

Mayor Chris Garcia pointed out that parking stalls for the grocery store were planned close to the entrance that connected to Crestwood Drive.

"Think of the stacking up that's going to go on here," he said, pointing to the plans. "Now is the time to do it right. I understand this is years off, but now is the time to do it right. This isn't right."

Smith said that if the council clarified its intent to make Crestwood a through street rather than connecting with an entrance to the grocery store, the developer would not have the grocery store on one side of the street and the parking lot on the other. A redesign would be necessary.

After Smith pointed this out, council president Terry Thomas said he remembered a discussion the council had regarding moving the grocery store.